Karl Popper's View of psychoanalysis - Research Paper Example

?What is Karl Popper's View of psychoanalysis? Sir Karl Raimund Popper is considered the greatest philosopher of science of the twentieth century. Hewas an Austro-British professor at the London school of Economics, was famous for his efforts in rejecting the classic observationalist form of scientific method, against empirical falsification. He is also famous for defending liberal democracy and social criticism, which in his opinion were necessary to create an ‘open society’. Psychoanalysis is the brain child of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. It is a method used to determine the true personality of someone. The basic theory behind the psychoanalysis is that there are two aspects to a person’s character. One is the natural ability and personality; while the other is the chain of events that occur in the early childhood of a person (a hydrophobic person can normally relate an incident regarding water from his early childhood memories) (Fromm, 1992). Another popular aspect of psychoanalysis is that the human cognition is primarily driven by irrational factors and the real driver of the human mind is not the conscious mind (usually called the frontal lobe) but the unconscious mind (Fromm, 1992). Those are the most popular notions of psychoanalysis from the perspective of Sigmund Freud. However not all scientists and psychologists agree with this theory. The biggest critic of Freud’s version of psychoanalysis was Karl Popper, who argued that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience, reason being; the theories proposed cannot be proven through scientific experimentation and therefore cannot be refuted. The term used for such knowledge areas is ‘not falsifiable’. Popper’s most popular book Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, elaborates his reasoning for his refutation of psychoanalysis as a conventional science. He was of the view that scientific knowledge is evolutionary; nothing is permanent or the last word. Whatever scientific knowledge proposes is nothing but a proposal and will always remain so until refuted or amended in the future by more resourceful people. In other words there can’t be any ‘law’ in scientific theory. The same principle is applied to psychoanalysis (according to Popper) but the nature and understanding of Freud’s version of psychoanalysis doesn’t fulfill the requirements of Popper. If there can’t be any test to verify the theories put forward by the Austrian neuroscientist then it means they will remain the same; un-amended, untouched throughout the future, making the proposals not falsifiable. Popper did not confine himself to psychoanalysis, he believed that the scientific basis of establishing knowledge and learning should be based on trial and error. Experimentation is necessary to separate the rest from pseudoscience. Karl even applied the same principles to subjects such as history and politics. To him there was no truth, only conjectures, and after corrections, a conjecture still remains a conjecture, it never becomes the truth. Origin of Karl’s Critique Popper used a term “critical rationalism”, as a means to explain his philosophy in a single word. This term can be better understood if its opposite is considered first, which empiricism is. Popper coined the term to create and opposite method and understanding to empiricism. From empiricism sprouted behavioral-inductivist version of science. Popper strongly opposed this notion and criticized with his own terminologies and notions. He claimed that scientific theories are abstract by nature; nothing can be established in absolute terms. All scientific knowledge can only be tested indirectly and only based on their implications. All human knowledge (including Freud’s version of psychoanalysis) is hypothetical. The reason why scientists and common people come up with theories and knowledge that certain things are this way or that is only because humans imagine them when faced with a problem. The mind is generally problem solver, it is the nature of the brain to engage into a riddle and try to solve it. So from this notion comes the conclusion that no matter how many positive outcomes a scientific experiment generates, it can never be ‘confirmed’. However, on the contrary, a counterexample can logically decide if the theory is scientifically sound or not. The mechanism works in such a way that the implications are put to the test and a counter example is derived that is logically opposite to the proposed implication. If this is true, then the theory is deemed as falsified. Psychoanalysis cannot be falsified, and this was Karl’s argument against Freud’s notion. But falsification was never meant to be rejection of a theory. It wasn’t the case that Karl wanted to reject or prove Sigmund Freud’s studies wrong. He only wanted to include them in the scientific knowledge but they never qualified to be included in his hall of scientific theories, and that is why he placed them in the pseudoscience yard. Karl’s scientific philosophy dances right between the two valleys of verification and falsification; anything that needs to be verified should be falsified. That is why he criticized not only psychoanalysis but contemporary Marxism on the basis that these theories are not falsifiable. Karl considered it weakness in the claim about the relevance of psychoanalysis but the interesting thing is that the same principles and basis on which Freud deemed it scientifically relevant are the same principles that Karl regards as weaknesses. Freud thought he can explain every facet, every aspect of a human behavior through his psychoanalysis. Only this claim is sufficient to be rejected according to Popper as such a statement entails highly unpredictable content. Psychoanalytic theories are not precise, there are no negative implications of the theories, and this gives them immunity from being falsified. Demarcation The whole debate about Freud’s version of psychoanalysis and Popper’s claim against its validity can be tied to the problem of Demarcation; the boundary of scientific knowledge according Popper. For instance, what are the criteria that a theory should or shouldn’t be included along with other scientific theories? In his demarcation, Popper had two areas in which he put theories; one as science and the other as non-science or pseudoscience. His pseudoscience category contained metaphysics, psychoanalysis, logic and even Adler’s individual psychology (Popper, 2002). Moreover he uses the concept of induction in his tests with which he regards theories as scientific or non-scientific. He regards induction as a process that is never really used in science. He agreed with Hume on his Humean critique of the method of induction. From the conditions of demarcation set by Popper; subjects like chemistry, physics, non-introspective psychology and many others of the same relevance are scientific knowledge base areas. On the contrary, psychoanalysis, phrenology, astrology, and even religion are pseudoscience subjects. Psychoanalysis being put in the pseudoscience box doesn’t make it useless. It is full of useful information, but until the theories proposed by psychoanalysis can be formulated in such a way that they can be falsified, psychoanalysis will remain pseudoscience (Thornton, 2009). Summarizing Popper’s falsification theory, it would be suffice to say that a specific observation is scientific if and only if the statement can be divided into two of the following classes (Thornton, 2009); a) The class where all the statements that are inconsistent with the basic statement, contradicts the basic notion or somehow takes the opposing stance – are regarded as potential falsifiers. These are the statements, if stand true, will nullify the basic proposal. b) The class that holds all the statements that is consistent with the basic statement, such that they somehow support, bear the statement out or nourish the original notion. These are the statements that if stand true corroborate the theory. Coming back to Popper’s falsification theory, this plays crucial role in his demarcation of science and pseudoscience. But his falsification theory also has its criterion to truly falsify a theory. For instance one instance of conflict with the theory is not sufficient to falsify a theory. Many of the scientific theories have had those instances where those ‘glitches’ were still present yet the theories were accepted as scientific knowledge. The strange thing is that all the scientific theories conceived so far have been formulated in different ways. Each scientist, mathematician or a physicist has had his/her own genetically paved way to reach his theory. And this only supports Popper’s falsification theory. Popper agreed with Einstein’s views on the same subject of demarcation. Einstein was of the view that; “There exists no logical path to (the highly universal laws of science). They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love of the objects of experience.” (Thornton, 2009) Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy but the scientists conclude, propose and ‘prove’ what they feel like. It is a function of the subconscious mind; we are species of design and pattern, so scientists always have the option of selecting and rejecting aspects, numbers, factors, glitches. In other words they always have the option to bend the truth, leading to Popper’s proposition that there is no absolute truth. The theories that scientists come up with are merely solutions to the problems. Towards the end it would be better to summarize the whole debate regarding Popper’s philosophy on science and how that came to reject Freud’s psychoanalysis and other related fields. According to Popper, Hume saw a factor embedded in conventional empiricism which is the contradiction implied in every empirical process (Thornton, 2009). The notion that makes this possible is that the whole knowledge base is derived from experience plus the universal truths (including scientific laws) are verifiable through experimentation. The contradiction that Hume saw (and Popper agrees with) is that experience is highly subjective, experiences are open-ended. Therefore scientific laws are nothing but generalizations of empirical processes that the scientists ‘confirm’ by positive experience. Now Popper modified this process of scientific verification by eliminating the ‘empirical’ factor; meaning there is no need for empirical verification to establish something as science. On the other hand he added to this process of analyzing a theory that the ‘falsification’ factor needs to be embedded to satisfy the scientific demarcation. So, the scientific theories are not inducted from experimentation (experience) for Popper. The scientific experimentation is never performed to confirm or refute something permanently, so that the truth is concluded. Karl Popper is of the mind that “all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical” (Thornton, 2009). There is no way to prove a scientific theory, the only thing we can do is to provisionally confirm something or conclusively refute it. So what science has to deal with (according to Popper) is infinitely large number of theories that can explain the occurrence under observation. Therefore the simplest way to prove something is to reject the theories that are false, and can be demonstrated false and accept the theories that are remaining; the un-falsified theories. Popper’s method is not so different from conventional methodology. Instead of going along with the method picking up the verifiable theories from the lot, he adds a sift (the falsification test) so that all the theories that can’t be falsified will be blocked by the sift and the ones that can be falsified will pass through the soft and will fall into the bowl of scientific knowledge (just the knowledge, not the truth). This method gives more predictive power to establish a theory’s effectiveness and its scientific soundness. It is this critical way of demarcating that subjects like Marxism and psychoanalysis don’t pass the falsification sift and hence can’t be established as scientific knowledge. Sources Fromm, E. (1992). The revision of psychoanalysis. (pp. 13-14). Boulder: Westview Press. Popper, K. R. (2002). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. (Vol. 2, p. 55). London, England: Routledge. Thornton, S. (2009). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ Read More